The Pretoria High Court this week heard a challenge to the regulation of complementary medicine in South Africa. Tendai Mafuma and Julia Chaskalson explains why the case is important and why SECTION27 and the TAC got involved.
Tendai Mafuma describes what happened when SECTION27 tried to use new regulations to bring an end to the promotion of an unproven treatment for COVID-19 in South Africa and compares the current situation with the TAC’s successful court battle against Matthias Rath’s promotion of unproven AIDS treatments.
For a long time, South Africa has been a country where charlatans are able to flourish and peddle dangerous remedies for all kinds of ailments.
In KwaZulu-Natal, according to reports from the Human Sciences Research Council, there are 1.8 million people who are HIV positive. Of those, 1.1 million are on the antiretroviral programme. Yet, despite making great strides in the fight against HIV, the streets of KZN are still full of non-medical “healers” who prey on sick, desperate and vulnerable people desperate to be cured of HIV. Nomatter Ndebele visits two “healers” with thriving businesses.
